Saturday, March 31, 2012

Paul Whiteman was born on March 28, 1890. With a slew of posts last week, I failed to acknowledge him on the 28th as I should have, but that is being corrected now. After all, today in 1928 proved significant as well – Whiteman’s version of “Ol’ Man River” hit the charts. The song ended up going to #1 – giving the bandleader’s singer – Bing Crosby – his first trip to the top of the charts. Read more about that song here.

Whiteman’s name may be unfamiliar to anyone who has grown up in the rock era, but he was one of the most important music makers of the first half of the 20th century. According to the DMDB, he ranks third on the list of top 100 pre-rock era music makers, behind only Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.

In Pop Memories 1890-1954, he’s called “the most popular bandleader of the pre-swing era.” According to that source, Whiteman also has an astonishing 32 songs which hit #1 (indicated below) and a whopping 163 top ten hits. By comparison, the top two artists of the rock era are the Beatles and Elvis Presley. The Fab Four had 20 #1 songs and 34 top tens while The King had 18 chart toppers and 38 top ten hits. Whiteman also has 17 songs which rate in the DMDB’s top 1000 of all time list (indicated below). There are other classics recorded by Whiteman (“Body and Soul”, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”, “Ol’ Man River”, “My Blue Heaven”, etc.) which made the DMDB 1000 list as well, but in versions recorded by other artists.

31. Bambalina (1923) #1
32. Do It Again (1922) #1
33. Last Night on the Back Porch (with the American Quartet, 1923)
34. I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise (1922) #1
35. I Love You (1924)
36. The Man I Love (with Vaughn DeLeath, 1928)
37. You’re the Top (with Peggy Healy & John Hauser, 1934)
38. Indian Love Call (1925)
39. Crinoline Days (1923)
40. Song of India (1921) #1

Ol’ Man River

41. April Showers (1922)
42. Parade of the Wooden Soldiers (1923) #1
43. Just a Memory (1927)
44. I Get a Kick Out of You (with Ramona Davies, 1234)
45. After You’ve Gone (with Bing Crosby, 1930)
46. How Deep Is the Ocean? How High Is the Sky? (1932)
47. All of Me (with Mildred Bailey, 1932) #1
48. Side by Side (with Bing Crosby, Al Rinker, & Harry Barris, 1927)
49. I’m Just Wild About Harry (1922)
50. Way Down Yonder in New Orleans (1923)

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Billboard magazine has long been the leading authority in the music industry when it comes to charting music. They provide a means of gauging quantifiable success of music. The DMDB has aggregated five different Billboard lists which measure the best albums of all time based on various factors such as weeks on the chart, weeks at #1, and sales. See the resources at the bottom of the page. But now – here’s the list:

List especially created by Dave’s Music Database. Ranks albums in the rock and pre-rock era based on weeks at #1. Sources: Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Albums, 1955-2009 (7th edition) and Top Pop Hits 1940-1954.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

In celebration of the births of two of Broadway’s most celebrated composers (Stephen Sondheim: March 22, 1930; Andrew Lloyd Webber: March 22, 1948), the DMDB presents this list of the top Broadway composers of all time. Earlier this month, the DMDB presented its list of The Top 100 Songwriters of the Rock Era, so this list includes songwriters and composers from the first half of the 20th century in addition to Broadway composers to make this a companion to that earlier list. Without further ado:

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

The first Moondog Coronation Ball was held in Cleveland. The event is generally considered the first rock ‘n’ roll show in the U.S. Featured acts included a mix of black and white performers intended to attract a racially mixed audience. Among the acts were Paul Williams’ Hucklebuckers, Tiny Grimes’ Rockin’ Highlanders (featuring Screamin’ Jay Hawkins), The Dominoes, and Danny Cobb. At the time, nearly all performances, radio stations, and record labels were racially segregated.

DJ Alan Freed, who conceived and promoted the event, is credited with coining the term “rock and roll.” The event took its name from “Moondoggers” – the nickname he gave his listeners. Freed came to Cleveland’s WXEL-TV in April 1950 and began his late-night, rock-n-roll-themed Moondog show on WJW radio in July 1951. He went to New York in 1954 and left the business in 1959 after involvement in a payola scandal. He died in 1965 at age 43.

The event, held at the Cleveland Arena, proved a bit of a fiasco as promoters continued selling tickets long after they’d reached the venue’s roughly-10,000 seat capacity. At least some of the additional tickets have been attributed to counterfeiting. It was estimated that 20,000 fans showed up. When they couldn’t get in, the crowd broke down the doors to storm the arena. Local authorities shut down the concert after the first song for fear of rioting.

Review:
While they won the Grammy for Best New Artist in 2013, Fun. had been around since 2008, releasing their debut in 2009 and the follow-up, Some Nights, which garnered them their Grammy, in 2012. The song that put them on the map was “We Are Young,” a mix of power pop and alternative rock with an indie spirit which “captures the moments of youthful exuberance that come with a memorable night out.” SF Lead singer Nate Ruess said the lyrics were inspired by “my worst drinking night of all time.” SF

This song and Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” were hailed for returning rock to the pop charts. Rolling Stone’s Steve Knopper touted the song’s “sprightly pop-novelty feel” WK while his compatriot, Jody Rosen, described it as “rollickingly catchy” and “emo self-deprecation that leavens the bombast.” WK About.com’s Bill Lamb said the song “carries a hook in the chorus that is likely to stop many listeners dead in their tracks.” WK All Music Guide’s Tim Sendra notes Ruess “provides a very human core that grounds things even as the music builds to ornate crescendos.” AMG

Interestingly, the song didn’t become a hit until after landing a Chevrolet ad in Super Bowl XLVI and getting covered for American TV show, Glee. PJ Bloom, the latter’s music supervisor, noted, “Glee doesn’t break bands, we celebrate existing pop success – that’s our core model.” WK He changed his mind after hearing the song once, later calling it one of the “pinnacle song moments of the entire series.” WK

The song was propelled to the top of the pop charts, logging seven weeks of digital sales of more than 300,000 – the first to do so. WK It was the first song since Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor” to log seven weeks with 120 million radio impressions WK and was the most listened to song on Facebook in 2012. SF It was also featured in another ad in Super Bowl XLVII – this time a Spanish language version of the song for Taco Bell.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

My Fair Lady is “the crowning achievement” AZ for lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe. Some consider it to be “the most perfect stage musical ever.” CL “It boasts a magnificent score…witty, intelligent, beautiful, and romantic.” NRR This is “a collection of performances that long ago became a ubiquitous and indispensable fixture of American musical theater.” AZ

The musical was an updated version of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, a story about “the mythic Greek figure who falls in love with his sculpture.” TM In My Fair Lady, the story focuses on “the relationship between an elocutionist” R-C and “pre-World War I London flower girl Eliza Doolittle, who aspires to a better accent and the social advantages that will come with it.” R-S Its 2,700 performances “gracefully spanned the Eisenhower and Camelot eras, then begat a wildly popular film version, whose 1965 Best Picture Oscar capped the show’s decade of prominence.” AZ

The cast album “captures landmark performances by Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison and Stanley Holloway.” NRR Andrews was a “twenty-year-old revelation” ZS as “the fairest of all ladies,” ZS making the “loverly…score soar” ZS with her “glorious voice and emotional range.” ZS Harrison is “effortlessly charming” ZS in his recreation of the stage role as “Professor Henry Higgins (he had also appeared in the film adaptation of…Pygmalion.” R-S

“The show yielded an astounding number of songs that became standards, including the luminous I Could Have Danced All Night and I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” TM Among the other gems in this “embarrassment of riches,” AZ including On the Street Where You Live, The Rain in Spain, Wouldn’t It Be Loverly, and Why Can’t the English?.

For the movie version, Harrison and Holloway were back again, but Andrews wasn’t deemed enough of a star although “embarrassingly, by the time the movie opened, Mary Poppins had made her more than enough of a star to do so.” R-S Audrey Hepburn stepped into the role with the singing voice dubbed by Marni Nixon, who “was an accomplished Hollywood voice ghost, having previously sung for Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Rosalind Russell in Gypsy.” R-S

Ultimately the soundtrack paled to the cast recording, which was considered critically and commercially more successful. The cast recording sold 8 million copies in the U.S. and topped the Billboard charts for 15 weeks. It also spent 19 weeks atop the UK charts.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Rick Rubin was “dubbed ‘the king of rap’ two decades ago by the Village Voice,” DL for his role as one of “the key figures behind the commercial and artistic rise of hip-hop.” AMG He was called “the most successful producer in any genre” UT by Rolling Stone and “the most important producer of the last 20 years” WK by MTV. In 2007, he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. WK

“The barefoot Buddha with the woolly salt-and-pepper beard” UT has “amassed a discography that’s more than 90 albums long, a catalogue that’s sold in excess of 100 million.” DLEsquire magazine says Rubin is “one of the few industry giants with the confidence to just let artists be themselves.” WK Rubin says his role is “to inspire and challenge artists to do their best work, and to do it for the sake of the work as opposed to the ends.” UT Daron Malakian of System of a Down says, “Production with Rick doesn’t mean you're going to sit in a studio. It might mean you go to a record store or to the beach. Or you go for a drive. You bond as people first.” DL

He was born on March 10, 1963, in Long Island, New York. He grew up there in an upper-middle class neighborhood and “his parents hoped their only child would become a doctor or a lawyer.” DL Rubin “enrolled at NYU and had every intention of applying to law school until rap got in the way.” DL “Enamored of what he considered to be black punk rock, Rubin was a regular at hip-hop clubs throughout New York but was disappointed by most of the studio recordings coming out of the burgeoning rap scene.” DL As he said, “I started making records I wanted to hear. I didn’t know it was a viable job’.” UT

“In 1984 Rubin produced his first single, It’s Yours, for T La Rock and Jazzy Jay. Within two months the spartan song – built around beats, rhymes and little else – was one of the biggest rap hits in New York. Among those taking notice was Russell Simmons, a music promoter from Queens who also managed his kid brother’s group, Run-D.M.C. Simmons was shocked to discover that ‘It’s Yours’ – which he'd declared the ‘blackest’ song he’d ever heard – was produced by a Jewish kid from Long Island.” DL

Rubin and Simmons “founded Def Jam in 1984” AMG “operating the company out of Rubin’s dorm room.” AMG One of the first hits was LL Cool J’s Radio in 1985. Rubin’s style of “fusing rap with heavy rock” WK would also be a trademark of his early work. “It was Rubin’s idea to have Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith collaborate on a cover of Aerosmith’s Walk This Way…a production credited with both introducing rap-hard rock to mainstream ears and revitalizing Aerosmith’s career.” WK

By late 1988, Rubin’s relationship with Simmons was suffering. Rubin left Def Jam, moved to the East Coast, formed Def American, and turned his attention back to rock. “In 1991…Rubin…produced the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ breakthrough effort, Blood Sugar Sex Magik.” AMG The album’s monster hit Under the Bridge, grew out of “an entry [Rubin] discovered in one of lead singer Anthony Kiedis’s notebooks. It was a poem about overcoming heroin addiction, and Rubin talked the reluctant singer into presenting it to the band.” DL

In 1993, Rubin “officially dropped the ‘Def’ prefix from the label’s name” AMG and “Def American became American Recordings. Johnny Cash’s career-reviving album of the same name would signify Rubin’s greatest career achievement aside from launching rap into the mainstream. By bringing his stripped-down approach to “the sound of veteran singers and bands, [Rubin] could help them break out of the commercial rut they were currently in.” WK “Cash’s cover of Nine Inch Nails’ sorrowful tune, Hurt, would become the defining song of his later years.” WK

Rubin worked a similar magic for Neil Diamond, who had “created a cabaret image by drifting from his emotional core as a singer/songwriter,” UT but Rubin “ranks alongside Paul Simon.” UT12 Songs “was the crooner’s best-reviewed work in decades…[it] also resonated with fans, reaching the No. 4 Billboard ranking – Diamond’s highest chart position in 25 years.” DL

He won the Grammy for Non-Classical Producer of the Year for his 2006 work with, among others, the Dixie Chicks, who won the Grammy for Album of the Year for Taking the Long Way. The next year he was named co-chair of Columbia Records. In 2009, he won another Grammy for Producer of the Year. He took home the award again in 2012 for work on Adele’s 21, which also won the Grammy for Album of the Year. 15 of his albums rank in the DMDB’s top 1000 of all time.

Friday, March 9, 2012

This list was originally posted on the Dave’s Music Database Facebook page on July 1, 2010 and then updated on March 9, 2012, aggregating 36 different sources (see resources at bottom of page).

Despite attempts to gather a wide variety of lists, the emphasis of the lists still heavily largely on singer/songwriters from the rock era, giving short shrift to Broadway, early 20th century writers, and classical composers. As such, I have created two other lists – Composers from Broadway and the Early 20th Century and The Top 50 Classical Composers. However, here’s the list of rock-era songwriters:

Ranked list of the 100 most successful songwriters in British chart history. Guinness published books on the UK charts for years and it is assumed that this list came from one of those editions, but there are no details.